The Lost Mata Hari Ring Page 5

  Trace continued. “I had to re-invent myself again, you see, as an exotic oriental dancer, disguising my real identity. I took the name Mata Hari, which means ‘eye of the day’ in Malay.”

  Trace smiled, thoughtfully, with an inward stare. “Yes, I liked that name. I liked it very much. And when I danced, I fell in love with the world, and the world seemed to fall in love with me. Oh, yes, the world did indeed fall in love with me.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Cyrano let Trace continue, watching her closely.

  “I didn’t have any dance training, so I just improvised. I had studied Indonesian culture and traditions, including dance, and so my act was an imitation of oriental dances.”

  Trace smiled with pride, lifting her chin. “I wriggled gracefully in front of a statue of Shiva, as I seductively removed my veils. It was such fun, and I felt so powerful and erotic. I knew that the audience was excited by me. I could feel it. I was a great commercial success and I appeared in many European capitals. Gradually, I was accepted as an artist, rather than as just an exotic dancer. Did I have lovers? Of course, and why not? I was highly paid. As I said at my trial, ‘I am a courtesan. I admit it. A spy, never!' I have always lived for love and pleasure.”

  And then, as if a curtain had dropped, Trace’s eyes closed, her head fell forward and her shoulders slumped.

  Somewhat shaken, Cyrano leaned toward her. “Trace, are you all right?”

  Trace’s eyes popped open. She jerked erect, as if touched by a live wire, and snapped out of her dozing vision. Her troubled eyes flitted about, as she struggled to reorient herself. Finally realizing where she was and what had happened, she blushed, still feeling weirdly disordered.

  “Yes… Yes, I’m fine,” she said in her own quivering voice. She quickly sought to recover, realizing she’d slipped away into that other world—a very real and astonishing world—a world that seemed to be slowly taking her over. She fought panic, as she realized that when Dr. Hopkins had regressed her, a doorway to the past had been flung open, and she didn’t know how to close that door and lock it.

  She struggled for composure. “Yes, I was just remembering… I mean, I was remembering what I read today. It was so compelling. I felt like I was actually there, experiencing it all.”

  Cyrano sighed, smiling away his nervous concern, reaching for his almost empty wine glass. “Well, you certainly are a good actress, Trace. You completely captured me. What a performance. You really should perform in that Mata Hari play. Even your voice was changed. You completely lost your Southern accent and took on a sort of European accent. Very impressive.”

  Trace inhaled a breath to help cool her agitated mind. She reached for her wine and downed the rest at one go. Cyrano passed her an uneven stare.

  “Are you sure you’re feeling all right, Trace?”

  She fixed her gaze on him, feeling the pressing need to continue. “It’s just that I feel her life so deep inside me, Mr. Wallace. When the First World War began, Mata Hari was in Berlin about to start a new show. She was expelled from there because of the war, and the German authorities took all her money and several of her fur coats. She returned to the Netherlands in 1915. While there, she was first approached by the Germans to return to Paris as a spy. She agreed and accepted 50,000 francs—but only to get back what the Germans stole from her. This was all true,” Trace said with pointed authority. “All true. But no one seemed to believe her about that, or no one wanted to believe her. She never gave any serious thought to spying on the French. It was a ridiculous idea to her.”

  The wine began to soothe her nerves.

  “Yes, Trace, all that is true, as I recall it,” Cyrano said, taking over, placing his folded hands on the table. “Mata Hari made two trips to France in 1915 and 1916. Both times, she was closely watched by two rather clumsy and bumbling inspectors from French counterintelligence. After six months of surveillance, they produced no credible evidence that Mata Hari was spying.”

  Trace looked at him firmly. “No, they didn’t. But on her second visit, she fell in love with a 21-year-old Russian officer, Captain Vladimir de Masloff, of the Special Imperial Russian Regiment, stationed on the Western Front.”

  Trace stopped, her eyes going vague again, as if she were seeing something playing out before her.

  Cyrano lowered his voice and continued. “As Constance often said, Mata Hari’s relationship with Captain Masloff seems to have been the one true love of Mata Hari’s life. She was 40 or 41 years old at the time. This affair may have contributed to her arrest and subsequent execution.”

  Trace nodded. “Yes… Yes, she was truly in love with Masloff. Funny…I don’t know what finally happened to him. I should know that.”

  “Well, Trace, I did some looking into that a few years ago,” Cyrano said. “He returned to Russia, got married and vanished in the chaos of the Russian revolution. According to recorded history, he was never heard from again.”

  Trace’s face suddenly filled with urgent thought as she turned to Cyrano. “Did Constance truly believe that Mata Hari was innocent of espionage?”

  Cyrano considered the question. “She came to me once, very upset. She’d done some research and even hired professional help. She learned there were over 1,000 pages of documents that were ‘presented’ to the judges at Mata Hari’s trial. Nothing in them proves that Mata Hari was spying for the Germans in 1916. Some, in fact, directly suggest that, by then, she was a spy for the French, which is what she claimed. The military judges reached their verdict based on a summary which gave wholly misleading accounts of the evidence. As a matter of fact, the prosecutor, André Mornet, admitted 30 years later that ‘there wasn’t enough evidence to flog a cat.’ Her judges took only 45 minutes to return a guilty verdict and sentence her to death. Newspapers reported that Mata Hari exclaimed, ‘C’est impossible.’ It’s impossible.”

  Trace’s eyes were remote, staring, a smoldering anger rising in them. “Yes… That’s what she said, ‘C’est impossible.’”

  Cyrano reached for his crystal water glass, leaned back, and sipped at it.

  “So, here’s the picture, Trace. We have an extraordinary woman who re-invented herself many times over. She symbolized the independence and hypocrisies of turn-of-the-century Paris, but she failed to understand that the world had changed in 1914, when the First World War began, and soldiers were being slaughtered by the thousands in Belgium, northeastern France, Alsace-Lorraine and western Germany—what was known as the Western Front. I think she firmly believed, even until the day of her execution, that her magnetism and fame would somehow get her through the whole spy mess, and she’d be set free. Constance believed that Mata Hari’s curious mixture of worldliness and arrogance proved to be her undoing.”

  Trace felt an inner fire building in her chest. Her thoughts returned to the Mata Hari ring in the library. She felt the compulsive need to see it again—to touch it. To wear it. Her spine straightened with defiance. Yes, she wanted to show everyone that she was the owner of that ring. She wanted the entire world to know that she had never spied for the Germans, and that she had been set up to die by those scheming men because they were incompetent cowards.

  Trace could feel Cyrano watching her intently, his eyes firm, trying to understand.

  “I think you should stay the night, Trace. You look tired and stressed, and more snow is predicted. I have plenty of room in the house, and you can get a good night’s rest, and leave after breakfast.”

  Trace’s thoughts clung to images of that ring—the Mata Hari ring. “That’s very nice of you, Mr. Wallace. I am feeling a little tired from the wine.”

  “It's settled then. We'll have a glass of Port, and then I'll ask Andrew to make up the guest bedroom for you.”

  Trace gave him a brief glance. “You’ve been very kind to me, Mr. Wallace.”

  “Call me Cyrano, Trace. We’re old friends now. It’s done me good to talk about Mata Hari again, the way Constance and I used to talk about her. You’ve given an old
man a very pleasant evening.”

  After Trace said good night to Cyrano, Andrew led her out of the dining room, down the hallway and past the library doors. As they mounted the stairs, she glanced back over her shoulder toward the library, and her mind began working on a delicious thought: late in the night, she’d return to the library and slip on the ring. Her ring.

  Trace lay in the soft canopied bed, covered by a warm down quilt, hovering between sleep and the strange splendor of memory. She heard galloping horses, the sputtering motor of a single-engine airplane, and the distant booming of artillery, all sliding in and out of her head. She felt a silky veil sweep across her face; felt its whispering softness against her skin.

  Then she saw his face: The broad, square face and dark mustache of the French counter-intelligence chief, Georges Ladoux. A sinister face. A sneering face. How she hated him.

  In 1916, he had tried four or five times to convince her to spy for the French. She finally agreed to go to Belgium and seduce a senior German officer in return for a million francs. She needed the money. She even told Ladoux she needed the money, so she could settle down with Vadime Masloff and give up her other paying lovers. This information was recorded in the documents prepared for her trial but was deliberately omitted during the trial and in Judge Bouchardon’s summary—the summary which accused her of spying for the Germans.

  Trace felt the start of tears—old stinging, angry tears—and they began to pump out of her. She turned and buried her face into the pillow and wept.

  Why had she been so stupid? She had been arrested when she returned to Paris in February 1917. She should have never gone back to Paris. She should have gone home to the Netherlands to see Nonnie and to wait out the war. But she didn’t. Instead, she foolishly played into the hands of French counter-intelligence, the French military and the French government. They seized on the opportunity to turn her—a wanton and promiscuous woman, and perhaps a dangerous seductress and foreigner—into a wicked master-spy. They killed her as a deflection, as a scapegoat to cover up for the incompetent French generals’ mismanagement of the war, and for the 350,000 needless French deaths on the Western Front.

  With her face still buried in the pillow, Trace fell into a light, anguished sleep.

  CHAPTER 7

  Trace left her bed at 2:23 in the morning, the green light of the digital clock casting an eerie glow in the dark, unfamiliar room. She’d hardly slept. Her dreams had been filled with dark images and half-remembered faces that swam across her consciousness and bullied her.

  After he'd shown her to her room, Andrew had brought her silk pajamas and a bathrobe, both folded and looking new, as well as a pair of slippers.

  Now, Trace slipped into the robe, belted it, found the warm, fur-lined pink slippers and padded across the deep carpet toward the door. She opened it, poked her head out, and peered into the dimly lit hallway, waiting, listening for sounds. All was quiet and still.

  Her face was filled with determination and confidence as she moved across the blue and beige hall carpet toward the stairs that led to the library below. She quietly descended the stairs and made for the closed library doors. Again, she paused, straining her ears and eyes. It was as quiet as a cave, except for the distant sound of a grandfather clock, ticking away at her like a warning. As if making a tsk, tsk sound. As if to say, “No, No.”

  At the library doors, she gently reached for the right wooden door handle. She tugged. It didn’t squeak but opened and slid easily across the rollers. Trace slipped inside, quietly sliding the door closed behind her.

  She stood still, allowing her eyes to adjust to the murky darkness. Vague images and shapes slowly began to emerge. Was the Mata Hari collection still there, or had Andrew removed it to a safe in another part of the house?

  Anxious, with a high pulse, she started for the display table where the collection had been. Dread and excitement beat away at her as she approached, moving gingerly.

  She began to remember things, to see things, like old ghosts rising from buried graves. In the quiet night mood, the past seemed close, like a breath. Like a loud thrumming heartbeat.

  Outside on the patio, a garden light leaked into the slightly parted draperies, just enough to illumine the Mata Hari collection in all its enchanted mystery, casting a hazy glow on the Mata Hari painting, and on the warm, bewitching eyes of Mata Hari.

  Trace’s eyes widened on the objects: the Chinese marble sculpture, the ornate opera glasses, the two fur necklets, the silver cutlery and the old French Francs. Slowly, deliberately, her eyes moved along the table until they settled, with swelling pleasure, on the ring. There it was, alive and waiting for her, an old friend.

  A shaft of the outside lamplight struck it, and the ring broke into prisms of dancing emerald fire. Trace’s throat tightened. She felt an extravagant emotion of terror, recollection and hope.

  Her trembling hand reached for the ring. Again, it beckoned her on, as if some unseen energy were reaching back for her, gently tugging her hand, drawing it forward. As she took a shallow breath, her index finger briefly brushed the emerald’s fire. She jerked back her finger, feeling it burn, as if she’d touched a hot stove.

  A fragile, impulsive and inner darkness brought startled tears. She suddenly recalled, in great detail, Mata Hari’s children—or had they been Trace’s children? Her mind reeled and tangled, again tumbling about in the past and the present. In her mind’s eye, she saw her sweet children’s faces very clearly. She heard their manic cries when they had been poisoned. How she regretted all that had happened to them. She should have been a better mother. She shouldn’t have been so self-absorbed. She shouldn’t have gone off to Paris to become the doomed and silly old woman who stood there panicked and small before that firing squad. It should never have happened.

  Her dear son, Norman, was struck down by that damned doctor—an overdose of mercury poisoning. He was only two years old when he died. Dear Juana-Luisa, Nonnie, was given the same overdose of mercury but, by some miracle, she had pulled through. She had only been one-year-old. Why did the doctor administer the mercury? Because her husband, Captain Rudolf MacLeod, had caught syphilis overseas before they were married, and he'd neglected to tell her. Yes, he hadn't told her that, the bastard. Their children were given the mercury as a precaution against the syphilis.

  She should have never married Rudolf. Never. They’d met through a newspaper ad. She’d answered, including a photo of herself—something that wasn’t done so much in those days. There was no Instagram in the early 1900s.

  The article read: Captain in the Army of the Indies, on leave in Holland, seeks wife with a character to his taste. The man was Captain Rudolf MacLeod. He was handsome enough, even if he was 20 years older than she. He had a splendid mustache. Three months later, they were married.

  Trace breathed out a jet of air, as she recalled Constance’s words to her husband.

  “The invisible world lies all around us like a shadow. There it is, the still present past, only a breath away.”

  Trace felt those words strike her in the heart, nearly punching the breath from her. She had the obsessive need to pick up that ring and slip it on. And, despite a rising alarm that went off in her head, she reached for the ring.

  With a determined, crazed expression, she fumbled and trembled, and slid the burning ring onto her middle finger.

  Silence.

  She stood dead still, staring at it, transfixed. A stab of pain knifed through her chest. She called out, reaching for the nearest chair to brace her fall.

  From behind, she was startled by a voice. With effort, she turned, squinting. It was Cyrano Wallace.

  “Trace? Is that you? What are you doing?”

  His ghostly figure stood before the dark library doors.

  Trace tried to open her mouth to speak, but she had no voice. She could only make a strange wheezing sound. The pain in her chest struck again, and she doubled over in agony.

  “Trace!” Cyrano called, breaking towa
rd her.

  Trace lifted her head, astounded to see blue glittering sparks of light falling from the ceiling like snow. She became lost in a childlike wonder and, despite her pain, she was mesmerized by the dazzling spectacle, the lights encircling her, increasing in density and blowing about the room like a frenzied snowstorm, the cool flecks bathing her, tingling her face like snowflakes.

  Cyrano had vanished. The room had vanished.

  Then came a low bong of steeple bells, loud in her ears, and the cry of distant songbirds. She was lost in a rolling, blue, misty fog. She blinked about, her hands still pressed to her pained chest.

  The blue, scintillating sparks quivered for a time, and then shot off like shooting stars converging, then exploding into a brilliant flash—like the flash of a massive flashbulb.

  The floor opened up, and she dropped into a spinning void. Terrified, she screamed, reaching, her limbs flailing helplessly as she plunged down into infinite darkness.

  She heard a whooshing sound, felt a cold draft of wind. When her fall was swiftly broken, in a helpless panic, she struggled to right herself. Before she could, she was shot, like an arrow, through a long, endless tunnel that whirled in a rainbow of colors.

  Timeless minutes later, she saw a towering wooden door racing toward her. In a desperate reflex, she covered her face with her hands, believing a collision was imminent.

  To her astonishment, as she approached, the door dissolved into blue icy flecks, and she was flung ahead, passing through puffy white clouds, sparkling sunshine and thousands of tiny bubbles, like the bubbles in a glass of champagne.

  She heard a voice, a woman’s voice, like an echo in her head; “These are the bubbles of time… Yes… these are the bubbles of time.”

  Gasping for breath and struggling for balance, Trace tumbled through the scattering bubbles, her body tense, fists clenched. She cried out for help, and just when she felt her heart would explode with unspeakable pain and fright, everything stopped and went black.